Dot-catholic is cool, but what about .sex, .porn & .adult?

Moral and ethical questions abound in the creation of new real estate in cyberspace.

We sometimes struggle with our domain name. After all, who are we to own ThePracticingCatholic.com? As if we’re the epitome of what practicing Catholics should be. Hardly. Still, it does convey a message, a sense of mission. It tells you something about who and what we aspire to be with our digital presence.

Internet branding has now gone to a whole new level. Stick with me for a moment here. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) just approved new top-level domains (TLDs). What does this mean? Essentially, .com will no longer be the gold standard of Internet presence. Instead, the Internet will be populated with the likes of brand-specific URLs ending in .Google, .Apple, .Amazon, .Gap, .Ford, .Lexus, .Lego and .JPMorgan, as well as generic names, such as .movie, .music, .hotel, .love, .life, .auto, .news, .pizza, and .beer.

There’s even a .catholic TLD, which the Vatican is buying. Matthew Warner has an excellent post discussing this over at the National Catholic Register. Basically, this is a good thing, if for no other reason than keeping it out of the digital hands of some faux-Catholic or anti-Catholic group.

On the surface, this whole deal seems rather harmless as long as the “wrong” people don’t get a hold of certain domains. But among the new ICANN-approved domains are .sex, .porn, and .adult. Dot-xxx was approved in 2011 following years of opposition by the U.S. government. The owner of .xxx has applied for ownership of several of these new pornography-centered TLDs.

Some assert that adding new pornography-centric TLDs would help “clean” up the .com world over time by preventing a greater explosion of adult sites in the .com world and making them easier to block. Others argue pornography sites have no motivation to migrate away from their profitable .com sites. According to Dawn Hawkins, executive director of the anti-porn group Morality in Media, “Not one major site has since moved to .xxx.”

Still, the U.S. government should oppose the creation of porno-domains. On similar principle, the Supreme Court recently effectively upheld the FCC’s power to enforce decency standards on broadcast airwaves. Why shouldn’t the Internet be subject to the same standards? The Court has generally refused First Amendment protection to obscene material dating back to the late 19th century. Further, if it’s illegal to distribute certain types of such material by mail, we shouldn’t otherwise enable it by roping off space for it on the Internet. If you agree, register your opposition through the War on Illegal Pornography site.

Question: What do you think of the approval of all these new top-level domains? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

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